


Colors You Can See

by bomberqueen17



Series: Home Out In The Wind [10]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Backstory, Family Relationships - Freeform, Gen, Yavin IV, new republic naval academy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-23
Updated: 2016-09-23
Packaged: 2018-08-16 21:16:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8117860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: Poe and Iolo are both cadets at the New Republic Naval Academy, both hoping to get into the extremely selective Starfighter Pilot track and pursue their dreams of glory. Poe never talks about his home life, and has maybe deliberately cultivated an air of mystery. Poor Iolo, though; his father has just gone through a messy... not exactly a divorce, Keshians do it a little differently, but at any rate, there's no *way* he's going to go home for the school break. But that means he has nowhere to go, and they're closing the dorms.Poe takes pity on him and invites him to tag along to Yavin IV for the duration of the break. But he swears Iolo to secrecy about what his family is really like.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is kinda... light on plot and heavy on character. And I wanted to write a lot more, and maybe I will, but in the meantime, here this is. I keep posting excerpts of it on Tumblr and I figured, I should just post it here.  
> Future bits I meant to write included the introduction of Auntie Norasol and possibly, what it actually entails to Process Chanticlos, but I may or may not get around to that.  
> But I haven't had much of a chance to explore Iolo in the main body of the main story, so here's the backstory I came up with for him.
> 
> My fancast for him is Rami Malek, so do keep that visual in mind if it helps you...
> 
> ALSO: This was before BB-8 figured out eir pronouns! BB-8 is pretty new and not sure why it feels weird when people call him "he". So, for now, Poe uses masculine pronouns for his astromech, like many people do.

 

“Listen,” Poe said, and his voice was soft and serious in the dim room. Iolo looked up from his datapad: Poe was standing next to the desk, leaning his hip against it, and his face was in shadow as he chewed his lip. Something tense in his posture, despite the easy pose, conveyed that there was-- something-- riding on whatever this was, and Iolo’s attention was suddenly riveted. “I-- you can say no, if you want. But I just. If you want. I never-- there’s a reason I never invite people to come home on breaks. I come from-- it’s not exactly--”

“Are you inviting me to meet your folks?” Iolo asked, shocked.

“If you want,” Poe said, rubbing the back of his neck in poorly-feigned diffidence. “I mean. It’s a backwater jungle planet and I’m gonna make you swear never to tell anyone how completely embarrassing my dad is, but I also really don’t think you should spend this break alone and there’s no way you should be forced to make nice with your dad’s new— wife or whatever.”

It was a frequently-remarked-upon fact that no one had ever visited Poe’s family home on breaks, no matter how close anyone seemed to get with Poe. But Iolo understood instantly that it was one of those things, one of the ineffable facets of the Dameron legend, where you just didn’t joke about it.

“Yeah,” he said, utterly sincere, “I would totally love to go, and I will promise never to reveal whatever secrets you deem classified.”

A smile broke through the shadow across Poe’s face. “I knew you’d get it,” he said, and leaned over to clap Iolo on the shoulder. “I’ll send my dad a comm and book your ticket.”

“Thanks, man,” Iolo said, genuinely touched. He’d really been dreading this break. The torture of having to keep his damn mouth shut about whatever was revealed about the Dameron ancestral manse was more than made up for by the combination of not stewing in his own fretting the whole break, and also being able to lord his Secret Knowledge of the Dameron Mysteries over everyone else. He really was going to have to keep whatever secrets Poe asked, though, because Poe wasn’t a fool and there’d be no other possible leak sources. Poe had really kept anything and everything about his childhood home on lockdown.

Iolo was just going to have to be very canny about what Poe let him record, was all.

 

 

The first thing Iolo learned about Yavin 4 was that it was really fucking far away from anything else. The Battle of Yavin being a pivotal piece of recent history kind of led you to believe that it was somewhere important, possibly a major hyperlane crossroads or something, but it was in fact not. You had to take the Hydian Way for, like, three days, and then you went off on this Force-forsaken little winding path called the Gordian Reach for another whole day and then some.

Poe was really nervous, and it was kind of endearing, and Iolo knew that Poe had no particular interest in him, he knew that fine well, they’d used their words pretty early on and had figured out that Poe would fit Iolo’s emotional needs a lot better as a friend and there was no point pining for him and despite the fact that, being Keshian and therefore of a slower-maturing species, Iolo was nearly twice Poe’s age, they were mentally and emotionally at pretty similar points, and Poe was smart enough to know that. But. Nervous Poe was extra endearing, and Iolo had to really work at not letting his carefully-structured crush on Poe blossom out of hand into something else.

“I promised you,” Iolo said, “I wouldn’t tell anybody anything embarrassing.”

“I know you did, buddy,” Poe said, grinning easily. “I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t think you’d keep your promise.”

They were sitting side by side in the passenger’s lounge, squashed shoulder to shoulder in a single seat because it had the best view out the cursory viewing window, and because there was a large family of-- Iolo hadn’t caught the species name, but they clearly reproduced in litters-- monopolizing most of the lounge. Poe’s shoulder was warm and solid and Iolo was thoroughly in love with him, but the consolation was that Poe was clearly pretty fond of Iolo in return or he wouldn’t have invited him here. Not getting to have sex with him was the cost of that, and it was only because Keshians tended to hit their sexual peaks a little later that Iolo could endure it at all. But this was a long-term investment, this friendship with Poe, and Iolo was willing to ride out as much sexual tension as it took.

“You’re worried I’ll judge you though,” Iolo said.

“It’s not that bad,” Poe said. “It’s not like I’ve been hiding deep dark secrets. It’s just. You know. It’s an Outer Rim backwater jungle planet and my dad and auntie don’t speak Basic to each other and there are like five people on the entire planet and they’re all really weird and I’m completely incapable of any kind of emotional detachment about it.”

There was a crucial bit of information in there that Iolo had not previously caught on to. “Wait,” he said, “what language _do_ they speak to each other? Am I not gonna know what’s going on?”

Poe had to pull away a little to give him a look. “Iberican,” Poe said, like it was obvious. Was it? Had they talked about this before? “They speak Basic just fine, they’ll speak it to you, don’t worry, they just don’t when it’s between them.”

Iolo had heard of Iberican, of course he had— he’d studied it, it was one of the half-dozen languages the Academy offered instruction in— and he’d maybe caught a reference or two to Poe being fluent in it, but he hadn’t caught on. Fucking humans, so fucking _complicated_. He knew it wasn’t just a language you spoke, it was a thing you were, too. “Wait,” he said, frowning. “Are you Iberican?”

Poe stared at him for a very long blank moment. When his expression changed, it was to one of-- realization, maybe? “Yes,” he said. “I forgot, you weren’t around yet during that whole thing.”

“What whole thing?” Iolo asked, a little defensively.

“My first year at the Academy,” Poe said, looking unusually grim. “I mean. You know how in the holodramas the Ibericans are always the ones who are in gangs, right? With bad accents and they wear gold chains and are always getting in fights and, like, crying.”

“Is that what that’s supposed to be about,” Iolo said, years of puzzled half-observations snapping into place. “Oh!” And oh. Yes. He supposed, given that, Poe’s dark eyes and strong nose and oh. Yes. If he grew out a little beard, maybe, yeah, okay. Iolo was more up on human intra-species dynamics than many Keshians, but he still wasn’t as invested in it as he would be if he were human himself, he knew that. “ _Ohhh_.”

“Yeah,” Poe said. “I mean. It probably all seems dumb to you but to humans it matters. And one of the fourth-years used to pick on me, when I was a new baby first-year, and she’d do the accent, and a bunch of them did it, and it was kind of ugly until a sixth-year overheard them doing it and blew them in and it was a whole fucking drama.” He picked glumly at a seam in his pants. “It’s ancient history now but.” He shrugged. “Anyone who was around back then remembers it and is all weird about it.”

“You didn’t complain, though,” Iolo pointed out. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“No,” Poe said quietly, “and that’s really the only thing that’s saved me.” He pressed his shoulder harder into Iolo’s for a moment, face turned away. “Maybe that’s one of the reasons we’re friends, though. Because you don’t know or care about that kind of shit.”

“Maybe that’s why you mostly fuck xenos,” Iolo said, figuring it was about time to be an asshole. “Because we don’t even understand that kind of shit, let alone care about it.”

Poe gave a short bark of shocked laughter and almost fell off the chair, and it set off the litter of xeno alien-lings behind them, who set to yammering and shrieking, and Iolo and Poe wound up fleeing the room to get away from the unholy din, and also the wrath of the parent-xeno, who did not appreciate the ruckus any more than they had.

“If it’s that big a deal,” Iolo muttered as they fled, “stay in your goddamn pod.” The accommodations were reasonably comfortable if you weren’t claustrophobic. Fortunately Iolo and Poe were really used to being in one another’s intimate spaces; their pod was a pair of chairs that folded down into bunk beds, and a very flimsily-divided fresher compartment that had a toilet and a sonic shower and not really an actual door.

“I don’t fuck that many xenos,” Poe pointed out.

“Yeah, but the [suction-cup marks](http://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/142349119849/i-wish-i-had-time-to-do-this-but-i-want-to-make-a),” Iolo said. “That story is gonna see you into immortality, see if it doesn’t.”

They crammed themselves back into their pod, and Poe’s astromech woke up from recharging and did the incredibly annoying beep-filled recalibration routine it was so fond of. “Hey,” Poe said. “I got an idea.”

“What,” Iolo said.

“Not you,” Poe said, and BB-8 squeaked and whirled and generally got even more high-strung, which Iolo really didn’t need. But Iolo came along anyway, because he was bored. Poe’s big idea was to go along to the ship’s engineers and beg them to let BB-8 talk to the ship’s computers, and it was amusing just watching him turn on the charm.

“Well,” Poe explained, tipping his head a little, one toe turned in slightly, hands behind his back like a child, “so the thing is, he’s a one-of-a-kind experimental prototype, is the thing.” He gestured very slightly with one hand, bending his knees just a little, bobbing and then returning to a pose that leaned his hip against the doorway. It was kind of a master class in being appealing. “He’s a collaboration between the Naval Academy and Industrial Automaton-- you know, they make most of the astromech droids the military uses?”

“I’ve heard of Industrial Automaton,” the ship’s engineer said dryly. She was human, fiftyish (Iolo was estimating wildly; if she were Keshian he’d say she was a hundred and ten but you couldn’t just divide in half, it didn’t work that way), steel-gray-haired and dark-skinned and skeptical, but she was watching Poe appreciatively. His attempts weren’t in vain.

“I figured,” Poe said, gesturing a little, “of course,” and he shook his head, rolling his eyes a little at himself, with a dazzling smile. “Well-- their monopoly is such that there have started to be problems because automated defense systems can use the same algorithms the astromech AIs use, so, for example, pirates know how to evade or jam astromech targeting systems, and so on. So BB-8, here, he has a unique new type of learning AI, which means he’s more flexible.”

“Interesting,” the engineer said, looking like she hadn’t meant to be taken in by this at all but was reconsidering. Iolo amused himself trying to guess whether it was BB-8 or Poe who was more charming, as BB was doing one of his undeniably appealing twirl-selfconsciously-in-place dances that generally made people want to help him.

He’d learned it from Poe, Iolo noticed; Poe was shifting his weight a little, tilting his head, not as markedly as BB but undeniably similar.

“So the more data BB-8 gets access to, the more libraries he can build, the better his decision-making becomes,” Poe concluded. The engineer nodded thoughtfully, looking from Poe to BB-8, and Iolo saw her noticing the same thing, that the droid was totally copying Poe’s body language. Iolo knew then that whatever Poe was asking for, she’d grant, because her face did a strange series of contortions as she tried not to have an expression, and it was kind of like the mess hall lady in second year who could not stop giving Poe extra pastries. Same expression. Spoke volumes about the way humans reproduced, that even at his nearly fully-mature age, Poe could still trigger the parenting instinct so easily. “So I was wondering,” Poe said, “if it would be possible for my astromech to ask your ship’s computer a few questions and maybe read through some of its logs.”

The engineer looked a little bit resigned. “Well,” she said. “Some of our logs are confidential, of course.”

“Of course,” Poe said, bright-eyed and sincere.

 

Later, Iolo said, “Your droid flirts just like you do,” and Poe tried to mess up his hair, and he elbowed Poe in the face partly by accident trying to get away, and they crashed down the hall and got yelled at by a crew member, and it was around then that it really sank in just how long four days were.

But they made it, eventually, even if Poe had to manually shut BB-8 down for four hours one night because the droid got so excited about navigational calculations that he wouldn’t stop beeping.

 

Iolo was a little bit space-sick by the time they landed. It was a well-known thing, that young adult Keshians were prone to migraines on long hyperspace journeys, but Iolo had sort of been hoping he’d escaped that particular proclivity. He was fully physically-mature now, was the thing though-- Keshians had long childhoods and relatively rapid adolescences, and apparently he was adult enough now that his skull bones had fused. Great.

So he staggered onto the shuttle at Yavin with a spare shirt wrapped around his eyes, which felt like they were going to explode out of his skull. “Apparently,” Poe said, holding his elbow solicitously, “this view is majestic enough that a lot of tourists make the journey just to see it. But I’m not going to make you look at it because you might die. I’ll just describe it: Yavin is a gas giant and so the view of it from this satellite is really cool. The end.”

“Great,” Iolo said, clinging to Poe’s arm for dear life. BB-8 beeped something about taking a holo. “Thanks,” Iolo told him.

“This didn’t happen last time,” Poe said worriedly, manhandling him into the shuttle. There were two inhabited worlds in the Yavin system, and the transports mostly stopped at this little space station orbiting Yavin 2 to offload most passengers and cargo. Which meant they still had two hours in the shuttle to get to Yavin 4, but since it would be at sublight speeds, Iolo was hoping his migraine would ease.

It didn’t; he didn’t throw up, but he didn’t improve either. Poe kept his arm around Iolo’s shoulders the whole time, and Iolo let himself be shameless about just hanging onto him.

“I’m taking holovids of the scenery,” BB-8 told Iolo quietly, nudging his leg. “By my analysis this is very aesthetically appealing.”

“Thanks,” Iolo managed to tell him.

Maybe the pain was less when they landed, or maybe Iolo was just used to it now, but he untied the shirt and squinted carefully out. It was dark out, that helped. Even more helpful was the sweet, softly-humid air, alive with scents of vegetation. Iolo blinked carefully out at the night sky, but held unsteadily onto Poe’s arm as they disembarked down the ramp into the unprepossessing shack that served as a passenger depot.

It was basically a series of poles with a sloping corrugated-durasteel roof and no walls or insulation, just some interior framing that allowed there to be informational holokiosks and the like. Poe scanned one dubiously, and muttered something. Iolo squinted, but there was no way he was going to be able to resolve a hologram at this point. “What?”

“Oh,” Poe said, “the weather, that’s all. Rain for the next four days, but after that we’ll have some sun.”

Iolo swayed a little, dizzy from trying to focus his eyes, and Poe held onto his arm, steadying him. “I’m okay,” Iolo said.

“Is it getting any better?” Poe asked, tilting his head to look into Iolo’s face. He actually used his hand to brush Iolo’s hair aside, which was kind of too much, and Iolo closed his eyes and leaned into it.

A voice rather close said something in a language Iolo only vaguely recognized as Iberican. He’d studied it, it was one of the languages you got an approximate grounding in at school, but the only word he caught was “novio”, which he was under the impression meant “boyfriend”.

“Papa,” Poe said, sounding cross, and answered in the same language. Iolo definitely caught the word “amigo”, which he definitely knew meant friend. And ah. That was enough to know what they were discussing. Yes, having your eyes closed and your face tipped up into another person’s gentle caress was probably a compromising position.

Iolo blinked his eyes open, regretted it, closed them, and then squinted more cautiously at the person now standing next to Poe. Kes Dameron looked almost exactly like he did in the holos from the old Rebellion histories, only now in the context of Poe the resemblance was clearer. Kes was taller, and broader, and was grinning at Iolo.

“Hey,” he said, “you must be Iolo, it’s good to meet you.” He had an accent, which Iolo had absolutely not expected.

“Hey,” Iolo said. “I have a really terrible headache and am about to make a really terrible impression on you so I apologize in advance, especially if I barf.” He stuck his hand out, missed Kes’s hand, and Poe caught him again as he nearly unbalanced.

Kes also grabbed his hand, and said, “You don’t need to make a good impression on me, the fact that Poe likes you enough to bring you here says plenty. You know he’s never brought a friend home before?”

“I do know that,” Iolo said, wishing he could have his eyes open for this conversation. “I was invited conditional on signing a nondisclosure agreement so I wouldn’t wreck the deliberate air of mystery Poe has been cultivating all this time.”

“Did you get space-sick?” Kes asked. “It’s a long trip, I hope it wasn’t too bad.”

“I never used to,” Iolo said, and two pairs of Dameron hands were steering him out of the depot. Iolo grabbed onto the arm he thought was Poe’s. “But it caught up with me this time I guess.”

“That’s a shame,” Kes said, and Iolo realized belatedly that the arm he was clinging to was rather too bulky to be Poe’s; from the proximity of the voice, he was hanging onto Kes. Oh well.

Kes had a little speeder, and Iolo had to open his eyes to climb into it. BB-8 had some difficulty, and it took both Dameron men together to load him up onto it. From the banter, Kes had met BB before, but couldn’t understand Binary, much to the little droid’s frustration.

“You could make him a text readout,” Iolo pointed out, as Poe sat down next to him. Inside the speeder it was dim and quiet enough for Iolo to open his eyes. The headache was definitely getting better-- humid, terrestrial air was really helping.

Poe settled himself and poked BB-8 with his toe. “Beep is perfectly capable of generating a text readout if he really wants people to know what he’s saying,” he said.

BB rotated his upper sensor array, and projected a little holo readout that said, “NO”, and Poe laughed so hard he couldn’t sit up straight.

“I’m just bad with machines,” Kes said, firing up the speeder with an ease that belied his words. “Poe gets all his mechanical inclinations and most of his brains from his mother, you know?” Iolo managed to laugh at that, and Kes grinned at him over his shoulder. “I just gave him his looks.”

“Oh, ouch,” Poe said.

“That’s not an ouch,” Iolo pointed out mildly. “I don’t know, are you done growing? Because if you’re going to fill out like that I might have to reconsider my acceptance of your policy of not dating me.”

“Hey hey,” Kes said, “you can keep talking, and why won’t you date him, Poe? He’s adorable.”

“Papa,” Poe said, pained. “Don’t hit on my friends. This is why I never bring anybody home.”

“Ha,” Kes said, “I haven’t even gotten started yet,” and added something in Iberican that Iolo caught absolutely none of.

“Papa,” Poe said, low and offended.

“Es la verdad,” Kes said, and Iolo knew that meant “it’s the truth”, but he didn’t know why he remembered that. He should’ve brushed up on the Iberican instructional holos he still had on a datapad somewhere. Actually… they might be on the datapad he had with him. Hm.

“It’s rude to use a language not everyone present speaks,” Poe said, grimly annoyed. He dug at BB-8 with his toe. “That goes for you too, Beep.”

BB-8 projected another holo, and this time it said, “FUCK YOU”, and this time it was Iolo who laughed so hard he slid over sideways in the seat and lay against Poe, wheezing helplessly.

“What have I done to deserve this?” Poe asked. “Why must this happen? I am disrespected on all fronts.”

“Now you know what it’s like to have a kid,” Kes said. “They never respect you. They’re only ever assholes to you.”

“Poe,” Iolo said, mock-scandalized. “How could you disrespect Sergeant Kes Dameron? The Pathfinders were only _the most badass_ heroes of the Rebellion ever _ever_ , except maybe for Shara Bey.”

“Ah,” Kes said, laughing, “you studied up! Good man.”

“No no,” Iolo said, “everyone knows these things.”

“Suck-up,” Poe said, but he still seemed upset. Whatever Kes had said had rattled him.

“Pipsqueak survival skills,” Iolo said. “Don’t pretend you haven’t done the same.” It was depressing, Iolo realized, to contemplate what this space-sickness headache meant. It probably meant that he was done growing, which was a shame. Iolo’s family had a pretty wide variety of physical statures, and he’d sort of been hoping he’d get a couple more inches’ height before his bone ends fused. He was just about Poe’s height, and Poe was a reasonable height, taller than most of the women anyway. Much taller, and his legs would be too long to comfortably fit into the cockpits of some of the more exciting starfighters. But they were both on the short end of average for humanoid males.

“I was thinking it was too bad it was dark out,” Kes said over his shoulder, “but if you have such a bad headache you probably wouldn’t enjoy the view anyway.”

“I couldn’t even look out the viewport at the space station,” Iolo said. “BB says he took a holo for me. I’m sorry to have missed it but I’ll see it on the way out.”

“True, true.” Kes navigated easily, like he made this trip all the time. Iolo had been assuming the shuttle depot was well outside any settled areas, but there were intermittent lights out in the velvety darkness; maybe this was just as settled as the planet got. “Well, it’s a shame, the view up there never gets old. It’s real pretty.”

“Scenery,” Poe said, “we got. Not much else, but we got scenery.”

“We got plenty,” Kes said, “you just gotta be in the right frame of mind for it.”

Iolo leaned on Poe’s shoulder, as Poe’s body language had softened a little bit from his earlier apparently-genuine offendedness. Poe put his arms around Iolo to cushion him a bit from the jolting of the high-speed ride. “I know for us it’s only really midafternoon,” Poe said, “but I think we should just go to sleep when we get home, and try to get up when it’s morning here. It’s faster that way, to just get through it.”

“Yeah,” Iolo said, “well, twelve hours of migraine tends to throw your time-sense all off anyway.”

“Is that gonna happen to you all the time now?” Poe asked.

“It means I’m done growing,” Iolo said. “Which is fucking tragic. But no, there’s stuff you can do to make it better, and it eases as you get older. I wouldn’t have gone on the Starfighter track if I was going to be space-sick all the time.”

“I thought you were gonna be taller than me,” Poe said.

“I _am_ taller than you,” Iolo said, but it really depended on shoes and posture. If he was, it wasn’t by much.

Poe knew that, and snorted. BB-8 beeped sleepily, “When you’re next both vertical I can measure.”

“That takes the fun out of it,” Iolo said.

They fell silent, and Iolo let the warmth of Poe’s shoulder leach the tension out of his neck muscles. He didn’t mean to fall asleep.

 

___________

 

“You’re sure that boy isn’t your boyfriend,” Kes said in Iberican as he let the speeder glide to a gentle stop.

Poe sighed. “I would tell you if he were, Papa,” he said. “I’m not that hopeless.”

“You have never told me anything about any boyfriends or girlfriends or whateverfriends,” Kes said. “I worry.”

“Papa,” Poe said wearily. “Save your worry for something that needs it. It’s all right. We’re just very good friends. I would tell you happily if it were anything else.”

Kes came around and stood at the speeder’s rear hatch with his hands on his hips. “Did you drug him? Is he dead?”

“No,” Poe said, “he’s just passed out. He was space sick pretty bad, I don’t think he slept at all last night.”

“Is he prone to that sort of thing?” Kes asked.

“It’s never happened before,” Poe said. Okay, Iolo was completely unconscious, and it was definitely over the line into awkward. He kind of peeled Iolo off his shoulder, and handed him to Kes, who gathered the young Keshian up in his arms and carried him into the house like a child. That left Poe to deal with BB-8.

“Why are you being such a mean jerk?” he asked B as he unfolded the speeder’s rusty, disused steps. He had to bash at them with his foot to get them to move at all. “Why won’t you give Papa a text readout?”

“You don’t like him,” BB-8 said reasonably.

“What?” Poe stared at the little droid in shock. “Of course I do!”

“You don’t talk like you do,” BB-8 said.

“I think we’ve crossed some wires on this,” Poe said. “Beep, I love my Papa, he’s the most important person in the galaxy to me.” BB-8 bumped down the steps, missed one, and fell out of the speeder. But they were parked over a grassy bank, so he hit the ground with a wet thump and made an indignant noise before rolling out of the dent he’d made and going through an annoyed recalibration sequence. Poe managed not to laugh, and kicked the steps until they folded back up.

“You don’t talk like you do,” BB-8 said finally. “You talk like you wish you didn’t have to see him.”

“Well,” Poe said, shoving down guilt-- BB-8 didn’t understand sarcasm and had clearly misunderstood-- “that’s not the case, Beep. Maybe I’ve let you watch too many holodramas.”

“People are nicer to their fathers in holodramas,” BB-8 said. “You always try to change the subject whenever he comes up.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” Poe said. “Beep, sometimes when people feel too strongly about something they try to hide it by not discussing it. It’s like that.”

BB-8 made a skeptical noise.

“No,” Poe said, “don’t beep at me like that. You gotta be nicer to him. It’s really important to me, BB.”

“You be nicer to him first,” BB-8 said, and Poe waited until the droid’s sensor array was turned away before he rolled his eyes.

 

_______

 

 

The next morning Iolo’s headache was gone. He had slept for twelve solid hours, his chrono informed him. He didn’t really remember going to bed. Vague notions of Poe making him brush his teeth and physically hauling him around, but no concrete recollections.

He was in a bed in a dim room, and could smell humid green wet air, and could dimly hear a soft roar he eventually recognized as rain. Yavin 4, right, right. He rolled over. It was dim because the window’s shades were drawn, but he could see from the light at the edges that it was dim outside.

Rain for four days, Poe had said, the phrase echoing in Iolo’s memory.

Poe. Iolo sat up on his elbow and looked around the room, blinking a little dazedly. It was a reasonably big room, and there were two beds in it, and he had the vague idea that Poe had slept in the other one.

The walls were covered with old, slightly-faded holoposters of starcraft. Mostly starfighters. That was… sort of hilariously, embarrassingly cliché. Iolo rolled out of bed, discovered that he had somehow gotten stripped down to his underwear, blushed a little thinking that Poe had maybe undressed him. He pulled up the blinds and looked out.

Jungle, bright green; he could see the dazzling array of infrared shades in the foliage that showed growing, dying, rotting, and more growing. Mostly growing. It was the most vibrant thing he’d ever seen, reflecting the sky back up in some wavelengths, absorbing others. It was hypnotizing, and he stared at it in fascination.

A clanking sound from down the hall tore him away from his rapt concentration, and he hastily dug in his duffel and found enough clothing to be decent. He found the fresher, just down the hall, and relieved himself. The little room was decorated strangely, with small painted panels on the walls in symbols he couldn’t recognize, and a bundle of dried leafy sticks hanging up in the corner of the room that it took him a moment to realize had to be a scented herb of some kind.

He washed his hands and his face and braved the kitchen, where he could hear the low sounds of voices.

“Papa,” Poe was saying, and went on in Iberican. Iolo caught the words _lloviendo_ and, later, _selva_ , which he thought meant _raining_ and _forest_ respectively.

Kes laughed, and answered him. Iolo made it as far as the doorway, just as Kes bent over Poe, who was sitting at the kitchen table, and kissed him on the top of his head. Poe laughed, and put his arms around his father’s waist and held on. Kes straightened up as Poe pulled him in, and stood with his hand on Poe’s head, tousling his hair.

Which-- _whoa_ \-- was a mass of tight, tousled curls. Iolo had never seen Poe’s hair look like that. He knew Poe fought with it sometimes in the humidity-- he did too, a little-- but he had no idea it was to this extent.

Kes noticed him then, and smiled broadly. He had a really friendly face, like and yet unlike Poe’s; Iolo hadn’t really taken him in, last night. He was big, long-legged and broad-shouldered in a way Poe really wasn’t; his hair was salt-and-pepper, close-cropped, and his beard was still black, very exactingly trimmed. He had dark, dark eyes, deeper-set than Poe’s and a little hooded.

Iolo swallowed hard. For Keshians, age wasn’t as significant a factor as for humans, and Poe’s dad was _really hot_. He hadn’t forseen that at all. “Hey,” he said.

“Good morning,” Kes said, and Poe yanked back a little, turning to look. Kes ruffled his hair again, and let him go.

“Hey,” Poe said. “How’s your head?”

“Better,” Iolo said. “Sorry I was such a lump!”

“I’m just glad you’re all right now,” Kes said. “Did you sleep well?”

Iolo nodded. “Like a, uh, asleep thing.”

Both Poe and Kes laughed at that, and Iolo realized they laughed the same way, and it was a thousand times more devastating in stereo. Oh fuck. He was in trouble.

“Well,” Kes said, “I have caf, if you want that to wake up with, but I also have _atole_ , which is what we more normally drink here, so if you want the full Secret Poe Dameron experience I suggest you try the atole first, if you’re not deplorably caffeine-addicted.” And he shot Poe an unimpressed narrow-eyed look.

“Sorry, Papa,” Poe muttered, not particularly sincerely. “It’s not like they serve _atole_ in the Academy mess hall.”

“I’ll try it,” Iolo said, “but I’m kind of used to caf too.” He noticed that Poe had two cups in front of him, and the one on the table was caf and the one he was holding in both hands was not. He peered into it. “What’s _atole_ made out of?”

“It’s kind of like porridge,” Poe said, “only thinner, and sweet. You drink it instead of eating it with a spoon.”

“It’s very fortifying,” Kes said, “and actually gives you something to work on, unlike caf, which just gets you jittery.”

 

______

 

Iolo came out onto the balcony and stared in shock at the sunset, which was violent shades of red and purple across the sky. Kes was leaning on the railing looking at it, and glanced back over his shoulder as Iolo came out. He did a double-take.

“You looked like Poe for a second,” Kes said.

“People get us confused,” Iolo said. “I guess it’s kind of funny, we’re not even the same species. But we have the same coloring, more or less.”

“You do,” Kes said. “Same stature too. Funny.”

“Different nose,” Iolo said. He came and leaned against the railing. “Does it do this every night?”

“Most,” Kes said. “If there’s been rain. It’s pretty here.”

“Is that why you stayed here?” Iolo asked.

Kes shrugged. “Lots of reasons to stay,” he said, “no real reasons to leave.” He stared at the sunset. “You can see more colors, right?”

“Yeah,” Iolo said. “I mean. Usually.” He gestured at the sunset. “Most of what’s spectacular there, though, is in colors you can see.”

“You got a pretty good handle on what we can see, huh?” Kes asked.

“I had some glasses,” Iolo said. “When I decided on this career path, one of my relatives got ‘em for me. I wore them around for a while, got used to figuring out what was stuff I’d be able to see that other people couldn’t, just so I’d know how to talk about it.”

“Did it help?” Kes asked.

Iolo laughed. “A little,” he said. “It’s good to have a general idea what’s just going to creep humans out, you know?”

“There’s always an element to that in any way of being different,” Kes said.

“Yeah,” Iolo said. He glanced sidelong at Kes. The light was outlining the edge of his cheekbone and the sweep of his eyelashes in a soft orange. “I actually didn’t know Poe was Iberican until we were on our way here. I mean. I didn’t know what that meant really? But I studied the language a little, I knew a little about it. And I had no idea. He used to help a bunch of us with our Iberican homework and I just assumed it was because he was ahead of us in class.”

“He’s ashamed of it,” Kes said, and his jaw was set. “He pretends he only knows the language from school on purpose.”

“They teased him a lot, his first year,” Iolo said. “It was before I was there, so I didn’t know. But he got made fun of for it pretty badly.”

Kes looked at Iolo then, and it was obvious that Poe had never told him. He opened his mouth, closed it, and looked down. “I never wanted him to go to that fucking Academy,” he said finally.

“No?” Iolo was surprised. “But you’re-- I mean, you’re a hero of the Rebellion, right? It only makes sense, you’d want--”

“No,” Kes said. “I don’t want Poe to have to fight the same fucking war I did. I want my child not to fight in wars. I want him to live in peace somewhere. I never wanted him to go to that goddamn school and I didn’t want him to become a starfighter pilot and I don’t want him to be in the military. Not for the Republic, not for anybody.”

Iolo stared blankly. “Really,” he said.

“Really,” Kes said. “I was okay with him learning how to fly starfighters because there’s always need of pilots. And of course he admires his mother, he should admire his mother. But I never wanted this for him. I didn’t want the Navy, I didn’t want the military. I never wanted that.”

It was so profoundly opposite from Iolo’s expectation that he didn’t really know what to say. “He talks about how you used to get him new simulator chips all the time,” Iolo said, finally coming up with some scrap of substantiation for the impression he’d had.

“When his mother died he spent a lot of time in her old simulator unit,” Kes said. “It was a way to stay close to her, I think, because she’d taken him up in that A-Wing, and she’d worked in that simulator with him. And I thought, anything to help him feel like she’s still with him, I can’t deny him. But I bought him every module I could find, because I wanted him to learn things besides starfighters. That’s why he knows all the modules. He knows cargo ships, he knows yachts. I found him freighters and ships of the line. I found him racing vessels. Any chip that could go in that simulator, I got him. Because I didn’t want him flying A-Wings.”

“Oh,” Iolo said, because that made sense. But it also was absolutely not how Poe saw it. At all. “So-- you wanted him to be a freighter pilot?”

“I just wanted him to be happy,” Kes said.

“You don’t think he’ll be happy in the Navy?” Iolo asked.

Kes regarded him for a long moment, inscrutable, the golden light spilling across his face and turning his irises amber. “I just don’t want him to have to fight,” he said finally.

 


End file.
